Alexandra Sims
Intelligent people are not only smarter than the average person - it seems they could also live longer as well.
A study by the London School of Economics found that smarter siblings are more likely to outlive their less clever brothers and sisters, with genetics accounting for 95 per cent of the connection between intelligence and life span.
The scientists examined the differences in longevity between identical twins, who share all of their genes and non-identical twins, who on average share half of their genes.
Writing in the International Journal of Epidemiology, scientists noted the difference in intellect between the twins and the age at which they died.
Focusing on three different twin studies from Sweden, Denmark and the United States the researchers examined sets of twins for whom both intelligence and age of death had been recorded in pairs where at least one of the twins had died.
In both types of twins it was found that the smarter of the two lived longer, but this effect was far more prominent in non-identical twins.
Rosalind Arden, a research associate at the LSE, told The Times that "the association between top jobs and longer lifespans is more a result of genes than having a big desk.”
She added though that the research does not mean parents can "deduce your child’s likely lifespan from how he or she does in their exams this summer”.

By Kiona Smith-Strickland
Are crows the smartest animals of all?
Many scientists think that corvids — the family of birds that includes crows, ravens, rooks and jays — may be among the most intelligent animals on Earth, based on their ability to solve problems, make tools and apparently consider both possible future events and other individuals’ states of mind.
“There’s a lot of research that has been done with both ravens and crows because they are such intelligent species,” said Margaret Innes, an assistant curator at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore.
Even in humans, defining and measuring intelligence is difficult, and it’s more complicated in other species, which have very different body shapes and have evolved for their niche in the environment. However, scientists who study cognition have defined a few measures of intelligence: recognizing oneself in a mirror, solving complex problems, making tools, using analogies and symbols, and reasoning about what others are thinking.
For a long time, biologists expected most of these mental feats to be unique to primates. The great apes — chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas — succeed at nearly all of these tasks, from making and using tools to learning large vocabularies of symbols, as well as recognizing themselves in mirrors.
A select few other mammals also meet most of the accepted criteria for intelligence. Dogs and dolphins, for instance, are very good at tasks involving social intelligence, such as communication, conflict resolution and reasoning about what others are thinking. Dolphins are also capable of basic tool use — for instance, carrying sea sponges in their mouths to shield their noses from scrapes and bumps as they forage on the ocean floor.

John Bohannon
“Slim by Chocolate!” the headlines blared. A team of German researchers had found that people on a low-carb diet lost weight 10 percent faster if they ate a chocolate bar every day. It made the front page of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about the Germanwings crash. From there, it ricocheted around the internet and beyond, making news in more than 20 countries and half a dozen languages. It was discussed on television news shows. It appeared in glossy print, most recently in the June issue of Shape magazine (“Why You Must Eat Chocolate Daily”, page 128). Not only does chocolate accelerate weight loss, the study found, but it leads to healthier cholesterol levels and overall increased well-being. The Bild story quotes the study’s lead author, Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D., research director of the Institute of Diet and Health: “The best part is you can buy chocolate everywhere.”
I am Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D. Well, actually my name is John, and I’m a journalist. I do have a Ph.D., but it’s in the molecular biology of bacteria, not humans. The Institute of Diet and Health? That’s nothing more than a website.
Other than those fibs, the study was 100 percent authentic. My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded.

I’m fairly new to San Francisco, so I’m still building my mental database of restaurants I like. But this weekend, I know exactly where I’m heading to for dinner: Nick’s Crispy Tacos. Then, when I get home, I’m kicking back to a documentary I’ve never heard of, a Mongolian drama called The Cave of the Yellow Dog.
An artificially intelligent algorithm told me I’d enjoy both these things. I’d like the restaurant, the machine told me, because I prefer Mexican food and wine bars “with a casual atmosphere,” and the movie because “drama movies are in my digital DNA.” Besides, the title shows up around the web next to Boyhood, another film I like.
Nara Logics, the company behind this algorithm, is the brainchild (pun intended) of its CTO and cofounder, Nathan Wilson, a former research scientist at MIT who holds a doctorate in brain and cognitive science. Wilson spent his academic career and early professional life immersed in studying neural networks—software that mimics how a human mind thinks and makes connections. Nara Logics’ brain-like platform, under development for the past five years, is the product of all that thinking..
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company includes on its board such bigwig neuroscientists as Sebastian Seung from Princeton, Mriganka Sur from MIT, and Emily Hueske of Harvard’s Center for Brain and Science.
So what does all that neuroscience brain power have to offer the tech world, when so many Internet giants—from Google and Facebook to Microsoft and Baidu—already have specialized internal teams looking to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence? These behemoths use AI to bolster their online services, everything from on-the-fly translations to image recognition services. But to hear Wilson tell it, all that in-house work still leaves a large gap—namely, all the businesses and people who could benefit from access to an artificial brain but can’t build it themselves. “We’re building a pipeline, and taking insights out of the lab to intelligent, applied use cases,” Wilson tells WIRED. “Nara is AI for the people.”